Report: the Report of the Commission on Intelligence on WMDs:
Source: Report to the President on WMDs, p.429-430
While the imperative to improve information sharing within and beyond the Intelligence Community is widely acknowledged, it is too infrequently noted that the Intelligence Community--and the new DNI--have an additional responsibility that is often in tension with the first: the need to protect intelligence sources and methods. What therefore is needed--and what is largely absent from today's Intelligence Community--are structures and processes for sharing intelligence information that are driven by commonly accepted principles of risk management.

Concern about security in a narrow sense should not crowd out actions to ensure national security in the larger sense. Sometimes--indeed, often--the right answer will be to limit access to information because of security concerns; but collection agencies, which for perfectly understandable bureaucratic reasons may systematically undervalue the need to share information, should not make this decision.

The term information "sharing" suggests that the federal government entity that collects the information "owns" it and can decide whether or not to "share" it with others. This concept is deeply embedded in the Intelligence Community's culture. We reject it. Information collected by the Intelligence Community--or for that matter, any government agency--belongs to the U.S. government. Officials are fiduciaries who hold the information in trust for the nation. They do not have authority to withhold or distribute it except as such authority is delegated by the President or provided by law. The Director of National Intelligence could take an important, symbolic first step toward changing the Intelligence Community's culture by jettisoning the term "information sharing" itself--perhaps in favor of the term "information integration" or "information access." But as the term "information sharing" has become common parlance, we use it to avoid confusion.